Twitter was slapped with a temporary restraining order yesterday, preventing it from terminating a tweets-for-cash contract it has with the data analysis company PeopleBrowsr.
Twitter wanted to end the million-dollar-a-year contract tomorrow, 30 November, but a judge in the Superior Court of the State of California court has …

The first conviction under California's anti-revenge-porn law was announced on Monday: 36-year-old Noe Iniguez was sentenced to a year in jail and three years' probation for posting topless pictures of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook.
Under the law, the "unauthorized posting of nude or sexual images of an individual with the …

EDS has filed a restraining order against Transport Trading Limited, a Transport for London subsidiary, to stop it handing the £100m-a-year Oyster contract to Cubic.
Cubic and EDS were majority partners in TranSys, which ran London's Oyster scheme. TfL, keen to get better value for money, was renegotiating the contract with both …

Embattled Bitcoin exchange MtGox has experienced a setback in its efforts to gain bankruptcy protections in the US, their opponents' legal team tells us, as the company has been hit with a temporary restraining order freezing its assets.
The order, attorney Christopher Dore of Edelson PC tells The Reg, was obtained by plaintiffs …

Selfie service Snapchat has filed a temporary restraining order against Frank Reginald Brown, a former friend and frat brother of co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who claims that he helped come up with the idea for the company.
The firm, which allows its mainly teen users to exchange auto-deleting photo messages, has …

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing six companies that allegedly unfairly crammed $100m in text message charges onto victims' bills.
Today, at the regulator's request, a federal court in California granted a temporary restraining order to halt those organizations and freeze their assets. The move comes after the FTC …

A US court has granted a temporary restraining order banning Research in Motion from using the name BBX for its new operating system.
Software firm BASIS International filed for infringement of the trademark last month and the court granted the injunction yesterday, saying:
BASIS is likely to prevail on its trademark …

Ride-booking app maker Lyft has scrapped plans to launch in New York City following legal threats from the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).
A Lyft spokesperson confirmed that the planned Friday launch would be moved to Monday as the biz continues to work with authorities on a plan that would allow Lyft drivers to …

Microsoft has settled its legal fight with Vitalwerks, the owner of the No-IP dynamic DNS service that Redmond crippled last week.
Last week Microsoft was granted a temporary restraining order against No-IP – and was handed control of 23 of its domains after convincing a Nevada judge that the DDNS service was acting as a conduit …

The US Federal Trade Commission has shut down Bitcoin mining equipment vendor Butterfly Labs over allegations that the company accepted as much as $50m in orders from customers but failed to deliver their purchases.
Butterfly purported to sell dedicated Bitcoin mining machines, with its more powerful models carrying price tags …

In a welcome victory for RegisterFly customers, ICANN announced yesterday that it had been granted a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against RegisterFly, the ICANN-accredited domain registrar accused of allowing tens of thousands of domains to lapse unlawfully. The TRO orders RegisterFly to provide copies of all current …

A US district court has ruled that self-confessed "hackers" have all the skills needed to swiftly destroy evidence, allowing anyone suing them to seize their equipment without warning.
The court in Idaho decided that a software developer’s computer could be confiscated without prior notice primarily because his website stated: “ …

Microsoft has won a court order to gain control of 23 No-IP domains owned by dynamic DNS (DDNS) provider Vitalwerks Internet Solutions. The US software giant claimed the domains were being used by malware developed in the Middle East and Africa.
Vitalwerks operates its No-IP DDNS service from Nevada, and there is no suggestion …

A bulk mailing company headed by notorious spammer Scott Richter has won a restraining order against anti-spam reporting service SpamCop.
Following an order by a Northern California District Court judge on Monday SpamCop is obliged to temporarily stop reporting complaints about Richter's company, OptinRealBig.com, to third- …

Updated
Microsoft has admitted that it did disrupt a significant number of legitimate users of No-IP's dynamic DNS service, but says the problem is now sorted out.
"Yesterday morning, Microsoft took steps to disrupt a cyber-attack that surreptitiously installed malware on millions of devices without their owners' knowledge through the …

Something for the Weekend, Sir?
Clear the desk of work, put the phone on voicemail, set your email to auto-reply and sign that restraining order against the increasingly desperate Madonna. Allow nothing to interrupt the 3:11 of sheer pleasure that is Cyberspace Spirit, the televised performance of the official anthem for China’s web censors.
As soon as I …

A San Francisco federal judge declined to order New Jersey-based hacker Geohot to turn over the technology he used to root the PlayStation 3, saying she doubted Geohot was subject to her court's authority.
The move by US District Judge Susan Illston on Friday was a blow to Sony, which argued that the 21-year-old hacker, whose …

Comment
Google's success in "assassinating" a democratically-elected legal opponent last week raises troubling questions about corporate power and accountability. The feisty attorney for the USA's poorest state is now trying to make peace, after being on the receiving end of a highly unusual lawsuit from Google.
Even if you will have no …

A federal judge has refused to strike down an order gagging three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates from discussing gaping security holes in electronic payment systems used by Boston's transit agency.
US District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. let a previous order stand, despite arguments from Electronic Frontier …

QuoTW
Something was rotten in the state of the internet this week, though it’s unclear who’s to blame. Reports started emerging from major news outlets that links to their stories had been pulled from the European web as part of Google’s new commitment to the EU right to be forgotten.
Was Google hamming things up by letting slip the …

QuoTW
This was the week when we discovered that all you have to do to earn thousands of dollars a month is be an IT wunderkind that catches the eye of one of Silicon Valley’s many tech boy emperors.
In a bid to secure the best possible talent, it appears that US tycoons are now drafting ‘em in young, wafting huge salaries and perks at …

A US spammer is still bombarding Net users with thousands of junk e-mails a week despite being the subject of an interim court order against him.
Sam Khuri, who runs the Net-based company Benchmark Print Supply, was taken to court by British ISP BiblioTech for sending spam to its users.
In April, BiblioTech rejected an out-of- …

Microsoft has disrupted the emerging Nitol botnet - and more than 500 additional strains of malware - by taking control of a rogue dot-org website. The takedown is the latest in Microsoft's war against armies of hacker-controlled PCs.
The Windows 8 giant's Operation b70 team discovered crooks were selling computers loaded with …

A temporary restraining order against SpamCop which stops it from forwarding complaints to ISPs against bulk mailer OptInRealBig was lifted on Tuesday.
Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of the US District Court for the Northern District of California lifted an order she had imposed only the day before on the anti-spam service. She …

Analysis
Google Glass wearers, or Explorers as Google likes to call them, have been getting some bad press of late, and the company has been moved to defend the headsets against the rise of rumor and speculation.
"Mr. Rogers was a Navy SEAL. A tooth placed in soda will dissolve in 24 hours. Gators roam the sewers of big cities and Walt …

In an astonishing blunder, New Zealand’s Crown Law Office and its police commissioner have admitted to a ‘procedural error’ when they seized cash, cars and other property from Megaupload chief Kim Dotcom.
According to the New Zealand Herald, Justice Judith Potter of the High Court has declared the first restraining order under …

Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates are once again free to publicly discuss gaping security holes in the Boston subway system after a federal judge refused to renew a gag order requested by transportation officials.
US District Judge George A. O'Toole rejected arguments by the Massachusetts Bay …

A woman who admitted biting a hole in her boyfriend's scrotum was spared a stretch in prison by Newcastle Crown Court on Friday.
The ball-puncturing biter, Maria Topp, a 44-year-old from Wrekenton, Gateshead, was instead handed a suspended jail term and ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work. She had pleaded guilty to the …

A fired former IT contractor for Toyota's US manufacturing wing has been ordered not to leave the country after allegedly accessing the company's servers, downloading proprietary information, and sabotaging its systems.
The automaker accuses Ibrahimshah Shahulhameed, who was dismissed from his contract programming job on August …

Microsoft is suing its erstwhile general manager Matt Miszewski, after he took a job with cloud computing rival Salesforce.com.
The company has won a restraining order from a Washington state court, which temporarily halts Miszewski from working at Salesforce in his new position of senior vice president of global public sector …

An American district court judge has cast doubt over the whole Megaupload trial, telling the FBI the criminal charges against Kim Dotcom may never make it to trial.
The New Zealand Herald is reporting that during a hearing in Virginia the judge, Liam O’Grady, doubted if “we are ever going to have a trial in this matter” when …

The jury has been picked for the forthcoming patent trial between Apple and Samsung to determine who has the rights to produce a rectangular fondleslab with rounded corners, among other things.
Tomorrow three women and seven men will hear opening statements in the case in San Jose's federal court. Jury selection took all day as …

A wannabe billionaire who claimed to own 84 per cent of Facebook based on a contract Mark Zuckerberg signed as a student has been arrested and charged with fraud.
Paul Ceglia was arrested after being indicted for two counts of fraud: one case of postal fraud and one of wire fraud. If found guilty he faces a possible 40 years …

An official Sony Twitter account has leaked the PlayStation 3 master signing key at the heart of the company's legal offensive against a group of hackers being sued for showing how to jailbreak the popular game console.
Kevin Butler, a fictional PS3 vice president, retweeted the metldr key in what can only be assumed was a …

Apple has filed suit against a number of retail stores in the Chinatown district of Queens, New York, proving that Jobs & Co doesn't only flex its legal muscle against heavy hitters such as HTC, Amazon, and Samsung.
According to a Reuters report, the consumer-electronics giant was granted a temporary restraining order and …

A middle-aged man with a sexual fetish for farm waste was sent to prison after a breaching a restraining order that banned him from being around a farm he has terrorised for years.
David Truscott, 40, was arrested after he broke into a farm he targeted, and covering himself in slurry, before masturbating, The Telegraph reports. …

A Bristol woman has been jailed for using a complex web of 15 different identities and companies to defraud the Revenue out of £118,000.
48-year-old Alison Reynolds was jailed for seven years yesterday for VAT fraud and police offences. Reynolds was found guilty of four charges of cheating the Public Revenue, one charge of using …

Mark Zuckerberg has asked a federal court in New York to throw out a lawsuit filed against him, because – according to the Facebook boss – the case is a "brazen and outrageous fraud on the court".
The uber social network boydroid filed a document calling on the US District Court in Buffalo, NY, to dismiss the case after firewood …

Google has resolved a lawsuit from a US bank that accidentally sent 1,300 confidential tax IDs to an innocent Gmail account, but not before the web giant complied with a court order to shutdown the account and disclose certain account info.
It's unclear what information was disclosed.
In mid-August, according to court documents …

Facebook has branded claims by a New York man that Mark Zuckerberg owes him 84 per cent of the firm "frivolous".
Paul Ceglia, of Wellsville, has filed a complaint at Allegany County Supreme Court alleging he and Zuckerberg entered into a website design contract in 2003.
According to the suit, the resulting website launched in …

A federal judge has ruled South Carolina's attorney general must keep his mouth shut about threatening to prosecute Craigslist over ads for prostitution.
US District Judge Weston Houck granted a temporary restraining order and preliminary judgment against Attorney General Henry McMaster on Friday to "refrain from initiating or …

For the first time ever, the US government has attempted to take down a botnet by setting up a substitute control channel that temporarily disables the underlying malware running on hundreds of thousands of infected end user computers.
The move, announced Wednesday after federal prosecutors seized domain names, IP addresses and …

A federal judge ordered prolific hacker Geohot to turn over his computers and hard drives and to stop publishing the tools used to root Sony's PlayStation 3 after finding his hack was likely a violation of US copyright law.
The temporary restraining order was issued on Thursday by US District Judge Susan Illston of San …

A federal judge has permanently pulled the plug on a California web hosting provider accused of harboring a "witches' brew" of pernicious content on behalf of child pornographers, spammers, and malware purveyors.
San Jose, California–based 3FN.net, which also operated under the name Pricewert, was also ordered to liquidate all …

New York firewood salesman Paul Ceglia filed a revised complaint against Facebook yesterday, in which the claimant said he had evidence that showed he was entitled to ownership of half of the social network.
Ceglia alleges he has email exchanges with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, where the two men discussed the terms of a 2003 …

Microsoft may have its head in the clouds a little too much at the moment, given that it just lost its corporate veep of online services.
Dave Thompson, who headed up Redmond's Office 365 business, is retiring from the company later this year after 21 years at Microsoft.
Microsoft shoved its productivity suite of apps into a …

Hackers say they unlocked the latest firmware for the PlayStation 3 game console, less than 24 hours after Sony released it in a desperate attempt to stuff the jailbreaking genie back in the bottle.
Sony announced the release of Version 3.56 on Wednesday. That same day, game console hacker Youness Alaoui, aka KaKaRoToKS, …

The confidential email at the heart of a roundabout US lawsuit against Google was never opened, according to the bank that accidentally sent the missive to the wrong Gmail account.
This summer, according to court documents, an unnamed employee with the Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank was asked by a customer to send some loan …

A stalker's plan to land a love rival in jail has backfired, resulting in a prison term for the stalker, although his rival was initially arrested for child porn offences.
A Basildon court heard that Ilkka Karttunen, 48, successfully broke into the Essex home of the object of his affection and downloaded child porn before taking …